


coming down with me (hand in unlovable hand)

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bodyswap, F/F, F/M, Girls Kissing, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Incest, the meteor minus vriska
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 12:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3381890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Dave won’t touch me now,” Terezi says. “A girl has needs.”<br/>“That’s not my problem.”<br/>“Objection! That’s been exactly your problem for the last sweep, Madam Moldy Cantaloupe—”<br/>Rose rams the blade of the cane into Terezi’s orange hood, pinning her to the floor. <br/>“Objection,” she says sweetly. “You need to know when to shut the fuck up.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	coming down with me (hand in unlovable hand)

  
_I hope that our few remaining friends_   
_Give up on trying to save us_   
_I hope we come up with a fail-safe plot_   
_To piss off the dumb few that forgave us..._   
  


*

 

“No,” Dave says when he finds out. He crosses his arms, uncrosses them and makes a sort of large squashy box with his hands, then rakes his fingers wildly through his hair. He repeats, at a much higher register, “No.”

Terezi waggles Rose’s eyebrows.

“Okay, guess who’s _Sir Not Appearing In This Film_ ,” Dave says, and flashsteps away.

“But which of you do I kiss?” Kanaya wants to know.

Rose waggles Terezi’s eyebrows, just for fun.

Kanaya doesn’t smile.

 

*

 

“No,” Rose says, pulling Terezi, anklefirst, out of a grate.

“How else am I supposed to stress test the new equipment?” Terezi demands, and lolls her tongue out in a gesture as habitual as it is useless. It smells like bubblegum and like meticulously hidden fear.

“Just because you’re playing freakout chicken with my plumbing doesn’t mean I want to come back to find I’ve got clown herpes,” Rose says, and flips the grating closed with the tip of her cane.

“Gamzee doesn’t have—”

Rose raises an eyebrow, which also raises the other eyebrow because Terezi’s face is irritatingly limited sometimes. Terezi raises just the one of Rose’s then pulls the other one mockingly up with a finger. Rose slides the handle of her cane up just an inch, letting the light shine sour-silver off the hidden blade.

“You got me,” Terezi says, cheerfully surrendering before a fight she could easily win. She lets her head rest on the metal tiles, and sighs. “Whatever clown herpes is, Gamzee’s probably contracted it just to fuck with us. If he’s given it to Karkat I will give him _such_ a drubbing!”

“In your own time, please and thank you,” Rose says.

“Dave won’t touch me now,” Terezi says. “A girl has needs.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“Objection! That’s been exactly your problem for the last sweep, Madam Moldy Cantaloupe—”

Rose rams the blade of the cane into Terezi’s orange hood, pinning her to the floor.

“Objection,” she says sweetly. “You need to know when to shut the fuck up.”

Terezi just grins with every omnivorous tooth. “I wonder if he’d fuck _you_ now,” she says. “Does Maryam know just what a distant second she is?”

Rose turns around, and walks away.

 

*

 

“Kanaya,” Rose says, hesitating at the doorway. Kanaya’s block is a riot of color and Rose isn’t sure if the girl’s even in here. It’s like mainlining potpourri, sweet-spicy and ferocious.

“Ter— _Rose_. Over here.”

Rose follows the sound of a gently humming sewing machine.

“May I enquire as to your most recent project?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you in days.”

The crisp mint blur that is her girlfriend reaches out, touches her hip, very gently, as if testing her.

“I’ve found myself occupied with this and that,” Kanaya says. “I finished a few brightseason dresses I’d like you to model when you return back to your proper corpus, and now I’m just patching a few of Karkat’s sweaters. I suspect he’s been chewing on himself during sleep terrors. If Gamzee was doing his job—”

“He is,” Rose says, and puts a hand on Kanaya’s shoulder. Kanaya lets it remain there for a few still, uncomfortable moments, and then they both shrug one another off.

Rose goes and picks up one of Karkat’s patched sweaters, and sniffs it curiously.

“Oh my god,” she says.

“Rose?”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Rose repeats dizzily. “Fuck.”

“Rose, put that down.”

Rose finds the sweater tugged out of her bared claws, and takes several deep, unhappy breaths. “Okay,” she croaks, and pats at Kanaya again. “How is... I don’t... why isn’t she... fuck.”

“I know,” Kanaya says unhappily. “Um, it’s best not to dwell on it. We’ll keep him away from you while you’re... like this.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“He just—”

“Don’t mention it.”

Rose sits on the edge of the desk. “Are we ever going to engage in concupiscent activity?” she asks, and the sewing machine goes wumwumWHIRRR _RKKGH_.

In the sudden silence she can hear Kanaya’s quick, steady breaths.

“Do you want to?” Kanaya asks finally.

“Do you?”

“I want to know if you want to.”

Rose glares at where her hands are folded around her cane in her lap, and wishes she wasn’t so blind. Kanaya smells like spearmint and something cloyingly bitter and it’s awful.

“I want to know if you want me,” she says finally. “It’s been two years and...” _I don’t know_ isn’t strictly accurate. _I’m scared that you don’t_ isn’t either. _I’m scared of what it would mean if you do_ is closer. No one ever tells you in books that there are things that no amount of words can convey.

“Do we have to have this conversation now?” Kanaya says. “While you’re like this?”

“What’s wrong with me like this?” Rose demands.

“Well, you’re wearing entirely too much Terezi, for one thing.”

“I’m still me inside.” Rose leans forward, tries to touch Kanaya’s face, and that sweet-bitter smell rises and spikes, like anise. Like licorice.

“I regret to inform you that you’re teal all the way through,” Kanaya says, all in a breathy rush, “and are likely to remain so until the mishap is reversed or wears off on its own and— I— we— _please_. I hate— this. Rose. I request that you respect my boundaries.”

The way she says this last part stings: careful, and brittle, as if the phrase is some exotic invocation, and still that dark scent hooks deep into Rose’s sinuses. Trolls don’t have boundaries, or respect. Trolls take what they want.

Rose leans forward, and brushes her nose to her girlfriend’s.

“I want you,” she says. “I want you to give me a straight answer for once.”

She can feel fangs against her own, clicking, and Kanaya’s making a lovely low thrumming noise, like the sewing machine, black enough to drink.

“To what fucking question,” Kanaya hisses. “Every time I think I know what you want from me—”

“I want you!”

“What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know! What do you mean, what does that even mean? It means I want you!”

They’re kissing, now, almost, more of a spar of teeth than a meeting of lips, and it’s absolutely thrilling, they’ve gotten this far before but not when Rose had her own set of fangs, not when she was so angry. Two years of loneliness and respectful propriety are going up in flames, and she kicks the sewing machine aside as she clambers up onto the desk. Kanaya hisses, ferociously, and grabs her horns and oh.

_Ohhh._

Rose’s knees go weak and Kanaya bears her down, twists her belly-up and bites her throat.

“You are the most aggravating—” a bite “—tangle of contradictions—” another bite, and Rose moans, “—I’ve ever had the misfortune of enduring a sweep’s worth of cohabitation with!”

“If you don’t want to put up with me—”

“ _I’m stuck with you_ ,” Kanaya hisses, and that black smell spikes, and Rose gets it, gets everything Kanaya and Terezi never say to each other, gets every instant of all the time Kanaya and Terezi avoid even brushing through the same room as each other, gets the way Kanaya has never so much as hemmed one of Terezi’s capes, and she goes small and limp.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and puts her hands up. “I’m sorry, Kanaya, peace, please. I didn’t know.”

Kanaya sits back in her chair, abruptly, and gives a low shakey moan.

She’s quiet for a long time. “She killed Vriska,” she finally says.

“I know. She’s sorry.”

“And yet Vriska’s still dead.”

“I know.”

A long sigh. “I know you know. And I know she knows, and she knows that I know, and so on and so forth, and none of it changes a goddamn thing. She did what she was compelled to do to salvage what she could. Vriska was going to be the end of us all, sooner or later, and she was this completely stupid, vainglorious, headstrong, selfish—”

“Girl that you loved,” Rose says.

Kanaya breaths in, out. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Rose says.

“Rose...” Kanaya squeezes her hand. “It’s just... It’s just easier not to want. You get used to it.”

Rose squeezes her back. “It really isn’t,” she says. “You really don’t.”

“Rose—”

“I’d like to be alone,” Rose says.

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Rose stares sightlessly at the ceiling, and squeezes Kanaya’s hand. “No,” she agrees. “I wouldn’t. But I already am, aren’t I?”

Then she gets up, and shakes out her cane, and makes her way to the door.

“We can still be friends,” she says. “Your avoidant emotional self-defense mechanisms aside.”

Kanaya breaths in, out. Rose can hear the sewing machine being heaved back on to the table.

“Do you actually love me?” Kanaya asks. “Are you in love with me?”

“Does it matter?” Rose asks.

“Yeah,” Kanaya says.

“Well,” Rose says, “I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out.”

She leaves.

 

*

 

Rose goes and finds Terezi’s scalemate pile, and captchalogues it, and hikes laboriously up to the highest tower in the meteor, the one where the station’s artificial gravity gets kind of funny. She misses being able to fly, but the burn in her legs feels good. She wonders how tough Terezi is, how tough bluebloods are, how much she’s kept in shape. Terezi and Dave spar constantly, when they’re not drawing or building. They’re always rolling around together.

Rose beat Dave savagely three times in a row, the first week on the meteor, till he said magic was cheating and they fought bare-knuckled and he split her lip and wouldn’t touch her, again, afterwards, not ever again and sometimes when she’s drunk that’s all she wants, to push him into another fight, to make him just fucking look at her.

When they were thirteen and a half in a different timeline they got drunk and they kissed, knowing they were twins, knowing their world was dead and their guardians were dead and their friends were dead and they themselves were waiting to die, and now she’s got to deal with that, knowing what her brother looks like, above her, soft and scared, sliding her underwear down past her knees.

And Dave doesn’t have to deal with anything. Especially not her.

Rose dumps the scalemates on the floor and makes sure each and every dragon is ripped in half. Then she curls up in the fluff and take deep, unhappy breaths of rainbow. She’s homesick, and heartsick, and she feels stupid and defiant and embarrassed and angry, and too young, and too old, and bored of everything. She wants to stay up here for the rest of the year.

She wants someone to come find her.

She lies awake for hours.

No one does.

 

*

  
  


“Look at you,” Terezi says. “Wallowing in your fetid misery over how life isn’t fair! You care nothing for fairness, Lalonde, you don’t give a pair of shits over reason or justice! Last sweep when the rules of the game didn’t suit you introduced the gameboard to an exciting new anal sphincter. And now you’re _sad_.”

“I’m allowed to be sad,” Rose says with as much dignity as she can muster. “It’s a human thing.”

Terezi slaps her.  “You’re a troll,” she says. “Buck up, pupa!”

Rose punches her right in the solar plexus, and the bloom of pain up her arm is incredibly satisfying.

“Now,” Rose starts, and Terezi sinks her teeth into her leg. Rose shrieks and lashes out and the two of them go tumbling across the floor, ripping and scratching. Rose can smell anise and human sweat and two different tones of copper, bright red pennies and oxidized turquoise and then Terezi hammers her elbow brutally into Rose’s nose and everything goes dark and teal and horrible.

Afterwards, when they’ve worn themselves raw and breathless, they lie together and pant for breath. Terezi takes something out of Rose’s sylladex, and she can hear a sloshing gurgle as the other girl drinks. The smell that’s been hanging around Terezi this whole fight spikes, bright and sharp, even through the thick crust of blood stoppering up her nose.

“Give me the bottle,” Rose says, her mouth already watering for it, and Terezi hands it over. It tastes horrendous, to a troll’s mouth, it tastes like silver death. She gulps the mouthful down and feels sick immediately.

“Urgh,” she says, and hands it back. Terezi laughs, unsteadily, and tilts her head back for another pull.

“Wrong metabolism, dum-dum,” she says, though not unkindly. “Though I’ll have to do some research when I get my regular guts back. Intoxicants are a pretty great way to make bad decisions more efficiently!”

Rose snorts, then regrets it when the mash of her nose throbs.

“Seriously, Lalonde, what crawled up your nook and died? And am I going to have to ram anything in particular up there after it?”

“I’m not who anyone would pick first,” Rose says, “and you are.”

Terezi makes a quiet, wet little noise with Rose’s throat: too polite to be an agreement, too sad to be a negation.

“I’m sorry,” Terezi says with Rose’s pink, drink-softened mouth. “It’s not much fun from here, either, I mean, you’re the one who got all her friends out alive. If I was more like you then maybe everyone wanting a piece of me might have actually worked out... It feels a lot like all I can manage is to stumble from one feelings disaster to the next.”

“Karkat,” Rose says.

“Karkat,” Terezi sighs. “And Vriska. I think it’s entirely possible that Seers just want whatever it is that’s worst for them.”

“Kanaya would be good for you,” Rose says. “She has very sharp teeth.”

“And Gamzee thinks fangcleanser is for decorating the bathroom mirror, yes, I know. But she’s also decent, and clever, and very funny, and substantially less fucked in the pan than the rest of us!” Terezi dabs at Rose’s bite wounds for a while, meditatively. “I can’t hate her back and she doesn’t deserve me to, Rose. Even if she has been shrinking all my capes.”

“You’re joking.”

“Frequently, but never about my noble regalia. I suppose she thought I would think I’ve just had a growth spurt. By precisely an inch a week.”

Rose finds herself smiling, which hurts a bit, but not as much as she’d thought it would.

Terezi nudges her with a soft elbow. “She’d be good for you, too,” she says solemnly. “You two classy ladies can get over your dumb shit together.”

“And you?”

“I’m never going to get over my dumb shit,” Terezi says grandly. “I am dumb shit all the way down.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Case in point!”

Rose takes the bottle away and kisses her, slowly. Her lips are cool but her mouth is warm, and she kisses back very kindly.

“This is a terrible idea,” Terezi tells her. “I’m drunk.”

“You won’t be able to have a proper orgasm, this drunk,” Rose agrees. “But haven’t you wondered?”

“Fuck,” Terezi sighs, “yeah, yes. Hell yes. We’re doing this.”

“We’re makign this—” Rose clamps her fangs together but it’s too late, his fucking specter’s been summoned, now, she can feel it how gently Terezi cups her face. She feels pathetic.

“Rose,” Terezi sighs, and kisses her again, and it’s okay. Rose breathes in and out and parts her teeth for a bubblegum tongue and tells herself, it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s okay.

Terezi grabs her horns, rubbing firm circles around the base, and the world goes soft and loose all around her. Rose tips backwards, gasping shallowly, unsure if she wants to press up against that disorienting grip or to squirm away.

In the midst of confusion and rising pleasure, Terezi gets her jeans open.

“Here we go,” she murmurs, slipping a hand into Rose’s panties to tease the questing tip of her bulge. “Aw, my little game grub, did you miss me?”

“Don’t talk to your— _nnhah_ , your equipment, while you’re, while, while it’s my equipment, th-thank you,” Rose manages, nearly choking on the rising, whining buzz that wells up from somewhere inside her, somewhere deep and warm and prickling with desire.

“I’ll talk to my pocket rocket whenever I please,” Terezi says, doing something fantastic with her interlaced fingers that makes Rose arch and rattle. “My meat whip. My mighty war trunkbeast. My stun slug.”

“ _I will cut it off myself_ ,” Rose snarls, digging her claws into Terezi’s sleeves.

Terezi cackles, wild and particularly shrill in her human throat, and goes down on her. Rose lasts all of three rolling, delirious thrusts into the soft warm cavern of a mouth, against the blazing twisting heat of a tongue, and climaxes explosively.

“There,” Terezi slurs thickly, dribbling teal all down her front as she sits up. “Popped your earth human cherry, you can stop playing the saddest violin to the tune of how nobody ever picked you to be on their earth human sportsball team or whatever the fuck.”

“Okay,” Rose says dazedly. “Sure. Thanks.”

“I don’t think _I_  ever looked this stupid after sex,” Terezi says, prodding her in the face. “Not even the first time. Damn, Lalonde, could you at least close my mouth—”

Rose turns her head to lick Terezi’s hand and gets a squawk as a reward, as well as a dazzling bloom of salt and sex across her palate, cream and teal and a luscious, living crimson tucked underneath. It sends a little aftershock sizzling up between her mouth and the clenching urgency of her nook.

“I bet it’s a lot more charming when _I_ lick people,” Terezi grumbles, wiping her hand on Rose’s stomach.

“You could stand to lick a little more,” Rose says. “You know. While you’re down there.”

“Greedy!” Terezi says, but approvingly.

 

*

 

Rose wakes to a pounding headache and a mouth that tastes like a garbage truck crawled down her throat and died.

“Nnnng _hghgh_ ,” she whimpers, squinting blearily into a terrible haze of colors and madness. Terezi only laughs at her. She’s in the middle of stitching a scalemate back together: the top half is orange, and the bottom half is bright green, and her laugh is her own again, a hoarse rattling caw. Rose drags her fingers through her own hair to find soft strands and a resounding lack of horns.

“I can’t believe the solution to this science fiction disaster was talking out our issues and growing as people,” Rose moans, curling until her face is pressed protectively against her knees. “Sburb can get _fucked_.”

“I know, right?” Terezi says mournfully, and pats her. “I didn’t have a single orgasm. You’re a terrible concupiscent partner, I hope you know that. _Delinquent_.”

“Yeah, well, next time you want to take my genitals for a spin, don’t work your way through a fifth of meteor rotgut,” Rose grumbles. “ _Fuck_ , I’m hungover. I hate you.”

“I’d say something clever about hatemance but I don’t think you’d give me any orgasms in that quadrant, either.”

“Mmm, yeah. Let’s not and say we did.”

Terezi snickers, throaty and familiar, then rubs her own throat in satisfaction. Rose takes out whatever’s left of whatever’s in the bottle. Might as well, she figures— she’s already dealing with the consequences, she might as well have some of the fun. There’s a companionable quiet as Rose sips and snuffles, and Terezi goes back to frankensteining another set of plushies. Her newest patient is getting a foam ass for a head. 

Rose finishes, and throws the bottle across the room to enjoy the shatter. Terezi doesn’t even flinch, just pauses, and regards her mildly, all soft red eyes and teal smears.

Rose asks, “Are we going to— you know, is any of this...” She waves a hand awkwardly. She shouldn't be embarrassed, but she is. She shouldn't be a lot of things, but she is. 

“As the dirt-ape blood oath goes, ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’,” Terezi says solemnly.

“Signed, sealed, and delivered,” Rose says, and raises her hand for a highfive.

Terezi goes in for a fist bump, and misses.

  
  


*

  
  
_I hope it stays dark forever_   
_I hope the worst isn't over_   
_And I hope you blink before I do_   
_And I hope I never get sober..._

—The Mountain Goats,  _"No Children"_   
  
  
  



End file.
